“It” of course, is the Fox News Desk. An Apple store on steroids filled with either large iPads or tiny people that feels like a Saturday Night Live spoof. Laugh now but I’ve got a Fox News Alert for you. Your future workplace will look alot like the Fox News Deck.

Increasingly, “knowledge workers” spend their time sifting through multiple streams of information in order to arrive at decisions or solve problems. If you are reading this at work, you likely have your phone on the desk receiving text messages, Outlook open on your desktop for emails and scheduling, Twitter open in your browser and at least one productivity application like excel or word (you know, to do “real work”).

Your desk is essentially a mini war room where you run command and control of your working life. An everyday triage of real time information demanding real time response that defines the modern workplace. A workplace that really is not so different from a busy news desk.

Laugh at the 56 inch touch screens but remember, critics said the iPad was “just a big iPhone” when it launched. As it turned out of course, the larger iPad provided a superior browsing and work experience to the iPhone. Today, touch is the prefered user interface technology from iPhones to airplane controls.

In an environment where information is being flung at us rapid fire it only makes sense that we should be able to field these bursts of information with both hands. Once fielded, why should we have to tediously click, drag, attach, copy and paste files? Isn’t it just easier to fling documents across our screen and onto a co-worker’s screen or onto a large screen that can be seen by everyone?

But why so large a screen? The same reason so many workers now prefer to use multiple monitors for their desktop computers. Allowing the eye to survey as much area as possible is simply the quickest way to scan large amounts of information. More screen space allows for the display of more information and therefore eliminates inefficient scrolling and switching between applications.

Sitting at a desk, squinting and hunched over a laptop is a profoundly unnatural and uncomfortable way to work. The easel arrangement puts our hands and body in an ergonomically friendly position. This is the same reason we prefer to use our IPads not flat on the table but canted upward slightly in our direction.

Unfortunately, the ability of technology to deliver real time information has greatly exceeded our brain’s ability to process and prioritize. The Fox News Deck looks comical to us because it is the epitome of our information overload ad absurdum. The tweets, videos and wire stories flood the Fox News Deck at a rate that makes the young “Information Specialists” (See yellow arrow in picture) look like Lucy on the assembly line.

Luckily, the next big thing in workplace technology will be the integration of voice, gesture and artificial intelligence into our everyday activities (think the computer in StarTrek). In the next five years, your devices will filter and prioritize incoming data for you by automatically learning from your workplace behaviors (check out Google Now).

Gmail will sift through your emails to determine what needs your attention now, what can wait and draft a suggested response. Excel will respond to natural language commands to “find the average of Column D” or “Tell me what accounts are the best performing?” Your phone will read your heart rate and body temperature to determine your stress level and text your spouse a heads up that you’ve had a tough day.

This leaves us with one big question. When does the real work get done?

If the work flow paradigm de jur is information triage then when do we do “surgery?” Amid all this modern bustle, how does the careful, detailed and important work actually get done?

The answer, very likely, is the same way we get “real work” done today. At home late at a night, red-eyed and hunched over a laptop on our kitchen table.

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In the last few years, a long-brewing technology trend has begun to bubble up into the policy-making process at all levels of government. That trend is called “Big Data”, and industry experts expect policymakers will be dealing with the questions it raises over the next decade.

Big Data offers the potential to drastically increase our quality of life (self driving car) but is also raises questions about privacy and security (NSA snooping). The response of policymakers to the questions raised by Big Data technology will have an impact on every American business, from Google to Publix, and every American citizen, from high school students to cancer patients.

The six terms below are a primer on the lingo used in the Big Data discussion.

Data Science: An emerging field that combines statistics, computer science and business analysis to gain insight from data. Google’s chief economist has called data science the sexiest job of the next decade. Florida Poly will offer degrees in data science when it opens next year.

Big Data: A term that describes data sets of massive volume that change rapidly and come from a wide variety of sources. Big data sets are so big that they cannot be maintained on a traditional database and require new methods to process and search. Big data has applications ranging from the self-driving car to decoding the human genome.

Data Mining (Undirected Discovery)*: The methods used to explore big data sets for patterns, trends and relationships between data. A data mining project seeks to find the most compelling relationships in the data as a whole. Organizations use the insights extracted from these data mining activities to improve business functions, discover new trends, or explain the causes behind certain happenings in the business.

Analytics (Directed Discovery)*: Closely related to data mining, however the primary difference is that analytics tend to focus on improving a single business area or answering a specific question. Example: determining what key factors drive sales of a certain product.

Predictive Analytics: Using data to build a mathematical model that forecasts a future event. Example: an airline using data about certain parts to predict when they may be about to fail.

Business Intelligence (BI): A collection of key data sets of known significance to a business or organization. These key data sets are often formatted into charts, graphs and gauges on a “dashboard” for easy reference by decision makers.

Datatization: The increasing trend of everyday activities being digitized and recorded through sensors and WiFi internet connections. It is estimated that more data was created in the last two years than in all of preceding human history. The smart phone is the primary agent of datatization in everyday life.

*There is debate in the data science regarding the exact meanings of the terms “data mining” and “analytics.” Some even suggest ditching the term data mining completely because of its negative connotation.

Each Saturday statewide, nearly one half million college football fans fill stadium seats at a host of stadium venues, ranging from Raymond James Stadium to Doak Campbell Stadium.

That lead us to wonder which team claims the largest share of this market by stadium size?

Obviously, the answer to this question is biased towards the school with the largest stadium capacity. And that turned out to be the answer. The Florida Gators have the largest market share of filled seats in the state of Florida. With a stadium capacity of 88,548, Ben Hill Griffin Stadium gives the Gators an advantage over each team. They have a share of 27.65% of filled seats. Second place, no surprise, went to Florida State, having 23.86%.

But when investigating this question, another one arose.

Which team fills the largest portion of their seats? Who comes closest to selling out every game. Again, the Gators win this contest. This is rather surprising given the recent run of success the Seminoles have enjoyed. The Seminoles have filled an average of 91.86% of Doak Campbell Stadium’s seats in 2012. The Gators were ahead, having filled an average of 98.93% of their house last year. Not to knock the Seminoles, though. Given the size of their house, 92% is still great.

The chart below is sized by the portion college football seats statewide held by each stadium and shaded for overall stadium capacity. The chart is interactive, if you like it, please share it.

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About Decision MediaWorks

Decision MediaWorks

Decision MediaWorks specializes in turning data into insight. We use the latest in data science to bring clarity to the hard choices made by anyone who follows Florida's unique politics, public policy and culture.

Our focus is on delivering insights that make sense out of publicly available data. We believe the success of any data science project rests on the ability to clearly communicate insights to decision makers.

Questions answered. Tough decisions made easier. That's what we do.

About Joe Clements

Joe Clements, President

Joe's first foray in analytics was estimating the amount of carbon stored in one acre of Ethiopian scrub brush as an intern for the United Nations World Food Programme.

After working for several years in political campaigns and as a legislative staffer, Joe saw that decision making is hard but that good data science (and the presentation of data) can make many decisions easier.

Joe was a Truman and Rhodes scholar nominee at the University of North Florida where he graduated with a degree in public relations. He is currently completing graduate coursework in political management and computer science at Florida State University.

In his non-data science life, Joe is married to Sara, fosters dogs, shoots guns, never misses a Jacksonville Jaguars game and tries to play golf.